| Bill Savage Holds Candid View on the Irish
By Sheila Burt
Irish American Post Chicago Bureau
 Bill
Savage isn’t your typical Irish American. Sure, he likes to throw back
a Guinness once in a while at a bar, but you won’t see him waving the Irish
flag. Nor will you see Savage wearing a tweed hat and or painting his face
green on St. Paddy’s Day in Chicago. When crowds flock to the streets for
city’s South and North side parades, he prefers to stay home.
Savage, a senior lecturer in Northwestern University’s English department,
holds candid views on what it means to be Irish American. He recently spoke
at Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Center on the complexities of Irish
identity and what the term could mean to people.
Sitting in Evanston’s Celtic Knot pub close to the Northwestern University
campus, Savage plunked on a bar stool to articulate his views on Irish
American culture a few weeks before the IAHC lecture. He’s casually dressed
in a denim collared shirt, with a gray Northwestern undershirt. Savage
looks academic, but not pretentiously so.
"If you have a knee-jerk reaction that Irish equals good, then everything
anyone Irish does is good, and that’s a very dangerous moral position to
be in," Savage says frankly.
"The metaphor I use is the way people behave on St. Patrick’s would
be as though on Columbus Day — which is sort of the Italian Americans’
national holiday — if everyone dressed up as Al Capone and went around
shooting each other with squirt guns. The worst stereotypes of the Irish
are on parade on St. Patrick’s Day. Why participate? Go to mass. It’s the
same thing, which is what happened in Ireland until very recently. Until
Americans showed up and asked, ‘Where’s the party?’"
He pauses and explains that he doesn’t want to sound offensive, indicating
that everyone should celebrate however they choose. But he prefers a much
more subtle approach to understanding Irish American culture.
One night, Savage was bartending at a local pub. Toward closing hours,
a man asked him and the other patrons at the bar if they’d die for Ireland.
Savage squarely told the man that it was time to go because he had too
much to drink.
"He was pretty insistent. ‘if you’re of Irish descent, you have to give
loyalty to the old country and die for Ireland.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m part
German, so what if Ireland goes to war with Germany? Do I go to the frontline
and shoot myself?’ And then I threw out his ass."
Savage, 43, has a rugged voice that well suits his masculine physique.
He wears round glasses and has dark brown hair with a full beard of the
same color. His eyes slightly gaze to the right when conversing, but his
passion for understanding Irish identity is undeniable.
The oldest of four children, Savage grew up in Rogers Park, a northern
Chicago neighborhood known for its ethnic diversity. His father is a retired
Chicago police officer, while his mother worked as an administrator at
Loyola University-Chicago. His younger brother, Dan, is a popular syndicated
sex columnist. His other brother, Ed, works as a teacher in Waterloo, Ia.,
and his sister, Laura, is a substance abuse counselor.
"I still tend bar one night a week so the joke is, ‘I get them drunk,
she sobers them up‚’" Savage laughs.
Savage almost fell into scholarly Irish research by accident . While
an undergrad at Loyola University-Chicago in 1983, he spent a summer at
the University College-Cork for a six-week interdisciplinary summer session
in Irish studies, where he started to ponder the meaning of Irish identity.
Savage explains that his Irish heritage wasn’t something talked about
in his home. In fact, he wasn’t exposed to much Irish culture before his
summer abroad. His parents were not flag wavers, either. " We didn’t do
anything that could be described as Irish culture stuff with my family
at all," he says.
"I didn’t grow up thinking, ‘Oh, I’m Irish,’" Savage explains. "I was
just who I was. I was from Chicago. Kids from the neighborhood talked about
it all the time, but I didn’t really get it because my name wasn’t an "O"
or "Mc," because there was no obvious marker. In fact, kids told me I was
Indian because I was Savage. But at some point, intellectually I began
to become interested in this stuff and having traveled, studied and lived
in Ireland a lot, I began to feel a connection."
While in Cork, he met Erin McCarthy, then a graduate student studying
abroad. McCarthy now serves as an associate professor of history at Columbia
College in Chicago.
"I do consider him in the heart and mind my closest friend," McCarthy
offers. McCarthy says Savage’s unique approach to Irish studies "where
he didn’t look through things with rose-colored glasses struck her immediately.
Although an Irish scholar, Savage also focuses on American pop culture
and Chicago authors. One of his upcoming projects involves editing a forthcoming
series called "Chicago Visions and Revisions," which reexamines the city’s
impact and identity.
"A lot of cultures have storytelling. T’s not just Irish culture," Savage
explains. He felt that that Irish have such a reputation because most of
them could speak English when they arrived in the States. He says that
the Irish appreciate verbal skill, poetry and storytelling in a way that
some other cultures don’t value quite as much. "But there’s no culture
that doesn’t have storytelling because storytelling is what makes a culture,"
Savage emphasizes.
Although Savage didn’t grow up engulfed by his Irish heritage, he remembers
hearing one story from his great-aunts — a story that in many ways exemplifies
the tradition of Irish storytelling. A distant great-grandfather was an
Indianapolis cop who was one of the first officers to work with an African
American partner. When this family elder died, his wife held services at
their house. His African-American friends came to show their respect, but
she wouldn’t let them use the back door.
"There’s this dramatic pause where you think, ‘Oh my God, my great-grandfather
was racist. But no, there’s a punch line," Savage says. She invited them
to use the front door like everyone else, he adds.
For Savage, that story demonstrates the value of race and ethnicity.
"So what kind of stories do Irish Americans tell to each other? What are
the values they are trying to express? That’s what my literary teaching
is about," he says.
When asked about his favorite places in Ireland, Savage recalls a small
town on the west coast where a friend's husband works on a fish farm halfway
between the villages of Drumshambo and Drumkeerin on the shores
of Loch Allen in Leitrim.. The silence there was mesmerizing, he
recalls.
"It’s so quiet at night — and I’m a city guy, I’ve never lived beyond
earshot of the CTA, there’s always been an El train I could hear — and
to have the kind of absolute silence where you hear a truck coming for
miles is really great," he says.
After describing the picturesque image of a sun setting in this small
town, Savage pauses and laughs. "I didn’t want to tell stories again, but
I guess that’s what I’m doing."
Now, that’s part of his identity.
 
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